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In Lasjan, some lessons in hate

Praveen Swami

How the Hindutva campaign in Jammu radicalised one village in Kashmir

Three people died in the first mass violence the village has ever seen
MIM-linked neo-fundamentalists tapped the vein of xenophobic fear

SRINAGAR: Most of the time, Lasjan is shrouded in a fog of diesel smoke, punctuated by the demonic howling of the high-intensity foghorns beloved of truck drivers on mountain highways.

Almost everyone here has something to do with the tens of thousands of trucks that run from Srinagar to Jammu: owning them, driving them, repairing them, loading them and, at the very bottom of the economic ladder, cleaning them.

Now, though, Lasjan is silent and clean: a hub not for commerce, but for the communally-charged anti-India movement that has swept Kashmir this week.

Just what happened in Lasjan on Tuesday is disputed. Police insist that former State Minister, Javed Mustafa Mir’s guard opened fire at a mob which was attacking the People’s Democratic Party leader’s home. Village residents, though, insist that the Jammu and Kashmir police fired on a peaceful protest march — and followed that up by firing at women who tried to retrieve the bodies of two men killed in the shootout.

Whatever the truth, three people — one an ageing woman — died in the first mass violence the village has ever seen.

Lasjan villagers played no role in the movement against the grant of land to the Shrine Board that broke out in July. No protests were seen against former Governor S.K. Sinha’s decision to grant land to the Shrine Board — nor celebrations when his successor, N.N. Vohra, revoked the orders.

But as Hindutva groups led protests demanding the land back, attitudes in Lasjan began to change. Many here were directly hit by the violence. “We had five trucks stranded at Lakhanpur for over a week because of the disturbances,” recalls local transport-business owner Abdul Ahad Mir. “And we lost tens of thousands of rupees. I thought: was this the future?”

Islamist claims that Kashmir was subjected to an economic blockade appear hyped: over 21,000 loaded trucks made their way out of the State between the first week of July and August, carrying much of the early fruit harvest. “The protests slowed us down by a few days, and made the passage dangerous,” says Poonch resident Mashooq Ahmad, who works the Jammu-Srinagar route, “but most of us got through.”

But the fact is that, compared to the same weeks of 2007, one in three trucks that left Lakhanpur were stranded along the highway into Srinagar — leading to shortages that weren’t life threatening, but panic-inducing, nonetheless.

Reports that ethnic Kashmiri truck drivers were attacked by Hindutva mobs in Jammu caused even more concern concern. Pantha Chowk resident Nazir Ahmad Wani and his neighbour Mohammad Latif, both of whom were serious injured in a murderous mob attack, were well known to villagers.

“It became clear that fundamentalists in Jammu were trying to choke our livelihoods and lives,” says local shopkeeper Mohammad Asad Mir, “so we decided to support those who wanted to cross the Line of Control, like Syed Ali Shah Geelani.”

Mosque-based resistance

Lasjan, though, had no significant presence of political Islamists like Mr. Geelani — which raises the question of how it ended up joining their cause.

Answers lie in the dramatic growth of the neo-fundamentalist Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith — one of south Asia’s largest movements of the religious right. In Lasjan, the Ahl-e-Hadith has invested in a new mosque and educational centre. Jammu and Kashmir Ahl-e-Hadith president Shaukat Ahmad Shah has been a regular visitor, supported by the village’s new truck-owning elite, who see the religious sect as a means of accessing social respectability.

In May this year, several hundred clerics led by Shah formed the Majlis-e-Ithaad-ul-Millat — or the organisation for national unity — to campaign against drugs, alcohol use, rape, sexual harassment, suicide and what it called “moral degradation.”

MIM-linked neo-fundamentalists tapped the vein of xenophobic fear which had fuelled politics in Kashmir ever since 2006, when the uncovering of a prostitution scandal in Srinagar was marked by Islamists as evidence of the existence of an Indian plot to undermine the region’s religious character.

Following the rape-murder of schoolgirl Tabinda Gani in 2007, Islamist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani joined in this campaign, saying “lakhs of non-State subjects had been pushed into Kashmir under a long-term plan to crush the Kashmiris.” He claims that “the majority of these non-State subjects are professional criminals and should be driven out of Kashmir.”

Shah’s decision to back the Shrine Board movement, built around Islamist claims that temporary land-use rights granted to pilgrims were in fact a façade for a large project to ship in outsiders, and thus reduce Muslims in Kashmir to a minority, proved decisive to politics in Lasjan.

When movement along the lifeline from Jammu to Srinagar was disrupted, these claims seemed to have vindicated.

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